Well, Paul.....tel us a little about yourself. How long have you been into the hobby? What kind of music do you primarily listen too....or is it all over the map? Does your other half support your audio journey/hobby?

Another question for ya'......how did you stumble across this forum? Just curious....

In search of accurate reproduction of music. Real sound is my reference and while perfection may not be attainable? If I chase it, I might just catch excellence.

The best way to enjoy digital music reproduction is to never listen to a good analogue reproduction.

First, thanks for all the kind words all, I actually do feel welcome here. ^_^

Well, Paul.....tel us a little about yourself. How long have you been into the hobby? What kind of music do you primarily listen too....or is it all over the map? Does your other half support your audio journey/hobby?

My audio fetish is an ongoing love affair, and it's hard for me to pinpoint when I became interested in quality audio since I grew up in a mid-fi (thought it was hi-fi at the time) home and my dad was big on LP's as well as being an early adopter of CD's so I've had access as long as I can remember. Longer in fact... I have a picture of me as a kid, maybe 8 or 9, nodding off with a pair of fat cans on my head. I don't know what they were, but I'm pretty sure I was listening to Dark Side of The Moon though them. I'm 38 now. I always liked clean blippy bleepy, ethereal, noise stuff, and whenever the house was empty I would really crank up Time Warp, track 1, Don Dorsey's Ascent, and any other oddball stuff I could find that just sounded neat to me. Old habits die hard! I still love good noise, and have discovered many artists and genres that cater to this. I also still have Time Warp, and still crank Ascent. My listening is all over the place, and so far Opera is the only type that no matter how awesome somebody promised me it is, still made me want to rip my ears off, set them on fire, and bury them on the spot. Strangely I'm still open to the idea though... Listened to lots of Floyd and classic rock growing up, my brother was a metal-dork so I got lots of that, and again my dad's eclectic stuff (didn't get dusty with me there. So I listen to everything, with Ambient/downtempo as a default. I spent the first half of the 90's chasing the Grateful Dead around, and the second half going to everything I could get into attempting to fill that void. If I have to explain it, you won't understand.

In addition to a few hundred Dead shows, I've seen Santana, Floyd, Alman Bros, CSN, Phish, Ween, Beach Boys, Dylan, Paul Simon, Zero, Steve Miller, Beastie Boys, George Clinton, ?, tons of blues acts, lots of electronica and hundreds of smaller bands in bars and clubs. I have a penchant towards bluegrass music as well, and have an 'studio grade' *washtub bass I made. I'm a glider pilot (sailplanes, not hang gliders...) hence my handle, Sisu1a, which was my first glider. When my hosting comes back online, I have a site that explains it better than I can here now. I dabble in machine shop work, composite stuff (here's some of my fiberglass/carbon glider parts I've been making: http://imgur.com/a/5ZOZD). I dabble in electronics with audio and electromechanical stuff with my flight simulator, I'm also a bicycle nut too... I collect/build models and miniatures and I also do some smithing work. Basically I know a little bit about a lot of things...

Currently my other half is my dog, a sweet pit (when I travel he's a 'chihuahua/lab') named Joppa, about to celebrate his 14th b-day. Though he claims he approves of my audio habits, he has yet to demonstrate it by actually contributing. On the other hand, he generally doesn't get upset if I set up big ugly speakers that clash with the decor, so I guess that's support enough, but sometimes I think he might just be patronizing me.

Another question for ya'......how did you stumble across this forum? Just curious....

I think it was because I was feverishly researching Carver gear at the beginning of my latest case of upgradeitus, which kicked in some months ago. I comb several other forums and occasionally post there too (AVScience, Hsu Research, r/audiophile, AudioKarma, etc). This latest round took a turn for the serious once I built my Baby TN's to bi-amp my Maggies to. Results were far better than expected, which left me wanting to provide better amplification, and that path led me to the M1.0t and the whole 'Carver Challenge' story. Absolutely fascinating. Needless to say, I was sufficiently hooked. Since then I've read, read, read, and read, then I read more. I've also watched all the Q&A's from Carverfests, and surprise surprise found myself really itching to get some Carver gear. Soon I might even be able to ask intelligent questions about Carver gear!

I always liked my Sunfire sub, although I sold it to a friend once I got my Hsu sub out and found it a twin for it. One thing I hated about my MKII was it jumping around when active, so like any sane person I mounted it to a 2" thick granite base with spikey feet, to tame the monkey. I'll get some pics and post it to the mods section later...but now back to our regular scheduled programming. I found an M1.0t local ly on CL and talked the guy down to $200 (scratch and dent special!) but our time together was brief. I will say was really impressed with it sonically and power wise, but this unit had a badly buzzing mag coil and I couldn't live with that. While I had it though, I put it through it's paces; from powering Maggies on pipe organ music, powering subs on dubstep tracks, and even some easy stuff like regular music through the Ohms. Trying to get to the bottom of the buzzing mystery led me to this site, as well as to Carversite (I know, mixed feelings here), which I also joined. I made a special high tech non-conductive stethoscope (5/16 vinyl tubing and a barbed wye) to safely probe inside the chassis with my ear while it was powered on. I was able to rule out any noise form the triad, and tracked all the buzz(s) to a few spots on the tranny. After picking Rich P and Bill D's brains (thanks again guys...), it was determined I had one of 2 problems:

1) bad tranny -fatal since they're made of unobtanium. 2) drawing excessive much current (more likely)

The only way to test for these is to isolate the power supply so I returned the amp to the guy rather than desolder 16 parts and possibly get stuck with the bag in my hand, even though a roached out M1.0t is still worth near that. I almost got an M500t a few times since, and I'll admit that early on had a boner for the cube. I went with the Acurus, since it fits the bill well and amps with oversize toroids and generous heat sinks make me warm and fuzzy. It's also a work of simplistic art when you pop the hood. Hmm, I think I've put enough of you to sleep with my wall of text by now. ...That and I got to go to work

-Paul

ps. I talk too much...

*It's not your father's washtub bass! Mine has a fixed neck with a flatwound bass string and a fretless fingerboard inlaid with ebony and silver marker dots to identify the fret stations. Action gets no higher than 1-1/2" and I can slide a 2 octave note. You don't push/pull the neck for pitch change, but rather play it like a normal upright bass. But with one string. Pics to follow if interested...

Thank you, Paul. That was a wonderful post and I enjoyed reading it very much. You can talk all you want here, I like your style of writing.....you made me laugh out loud twice with that last post.

I'm sure you will see that this forum is a great place to hang, relax, talk about your audio journey and have some fun. I do have another question for you, though. You had mentioned listening to Ohm's....I take it that you have a pair of Walsh Ohm speakers, as well as your Maggies?

In search of accurate reproduction of music. Real sound is my reference and while perfection may not be attainable? If I chase it, I might just catch excellence.

The best way to enjoy digital music reproduction is to never listen to a good analogue reproduction.

I take it that you have a pair of Walsh Ohm speakers, as well as your Maggies

I do indeed, a pair of 2XO's for my mains, <3... I've had them in service for about 4 years now, and their place at the head my system is still pretty $ecure. Ohms are really an underdog IMNSHO, as they don't seem to get a lot of attention, but damn they deliver the goods. I never met a pair of Ohms I didn't like. Very amp and placement friendly, and they're lookers too. I like eclectic gear, so those little truncated pyramids get me all warm and fuzzy, even when they're sleeping. I came up with a minor mod that I think makes them look even cooler too. After giving up my big Ohms (see below), the 2XO's always looked too short to my eye for my ears to stop passing judgement, so I made 3" thick plinth bases for them to stand on, which have matching oak veneer. What makes them look neat is they are cut at an angle that tapers back in. I painted the tops of them black, and it hides the feet. there's also a black felt circle glued down on the tops for cleaner diffusion. They look so natural with them, that not one of my friends noticed I had done anything. I first made a pair that continued the same angle, but I think the reversal looks much better. Makes moving them around even easier too, since all I have to do is position the base correctly, then put the speaker on top of it and wala! I'll take some pics if anyone wants to see...

I've owned a few other pairs in the past, both from the Sound Cylinder line. I had the Pro 150, and Pro 250. The 150's I passed on without much thought, but I miss the 250's at times. They went down to 32Hz, could swallow a fair amount of power (250w) but at 90dB were also OK with sipping from my girlie amp that was running them (Integra DTR 7.4). It would make me sad that I sold them, except that they went to a friend that frequently does really wild audio and video mixing that gets used in all kinds of underground performance art, so I feel like they've gone to good use. Get this -he was using blown out boohshelf speakers with GI-Joes and plastic dinosaurs sticking and shit out of the ports, and out of holes weren't even supposed to be there! (note- the rest of his house is also 100% covered in a carefully arranged, layer of action figures, dinosaurs, trinkets, bones, found objects, doll heads, manaquin parts, etc, wall to wall, floor to fucking ceiling. His entire cave is a work of underground art, a process he calls 'crustification') Needless to say it sounded like you imagine it would. Also flipped him a nice knockoff Sunfire sub I made: 15" cube with a 12" Earthquake driver SLAPS radiator. I used satin black Formica to cover it, was lock-mitered on all 6 sides, 1" walls, pecan braces, rubber coated inside and lots-o-stuffing. Hacked an ARS500 amp (made with Sunfire technology!) into some random chassis and used an old street sign to cut a new rear plate for the knobs and outputs, but located the volume to the front. I wanted to paint it black, but my buddy loved the industrial, hacked, raw look of the thing so it got left and is in good company. WTF was I talking about? Ohms, right... yep, I got some Ohms!

Heh, my Maggies made me realize I'm just... well, stupid apparently. The solution was over my head. Literally. I've had my MC-1's (the bigger ones that hingemount on the wall, 80-22K Hz) for about 5 years, but it was only a few months ago that I finally figured out how to place them. Just before then, I was even actually beginning to toy with the notion of releasing them back into the wild before I had the epiphany that fixed the problem. The chain of events that led me there went something like this:

It started with the pair of Baby TN's (2/3 scale Hsu TN1220's) I made, to bi-amp them to (in case your having trouble sleeping.http://forum.hsuresearch.com/showthread.php?t=95023) in order to make my rear channels run full range, since the AM radio effect of their 80Hz roll off always left me um, wanting, but I just put up with it and the rears of my system got minimal use. This always seemed a shame, especially when people would come over and notice them, usually prompting questions and sometimes even some listening. Not that anyone every slighted the sound they made, in fact most thought they were pretty neato but I don't really think they can really hear shit anyways, so that never tricked me into being satisfied.

They are mounted to the wall my couch is butted up against, flanking the couch, with one in a corner and one mid-wall. With them mounted plumb from top to bottom, I used to keep them angled at around 45deg, although they would get pushed around and the angle would vary (they swing like cabinet doors on their hinge mounts, which allows the toe angle to be adjusted to preference). Due to one side having to clear a heater, they are about 32" off the floor. There were really bad hot spots and also null spots, and I could never figure out just quite WTF was going on, although I figured it had something to do with placement but paid little attention to it and just 'lived with it', and for a long ass time too.

The Baby TN's are located directly under each one, and I use an Outlaw ICBM 1 to actively cross them (I've found 100Hz to be just right, with 24dB/octave high pass and 36dB low), and get really seamless integration. Life was starting to look up! After the honeymoon with the new sound was over, my objectivity returned and there was still this little matter of hot spots and nulls. Two things happened before I said "Eureka"!

1) my buddy mentioned to me he couldn't hear the speaker on his side of the couch when his head was in a certain spot. We traded places and whoa, I explored around with my ears and mapped a huge null zone, parallel with the the speaker's lengthwise direction, and directly off it's edge. With tones playing through them I experimented further and found I could dramatically change the size of the null and it's relation to the edge by moving it through it's 'swing range', with it being the very worst at 45deg. It became so obvious what was happening, that I was immediately embarrassed for having suffered 5 years of such an easily cured syndrome. What was happening was the 180 out of phase stuff was coming off the back of the speaker and cancelling with the waves off the front. The 45 toe angle creates a perfectly symmetrical wave propagation and collects into the largest null. With this information slowly peculating it's way through my neural pathways, I sat back for some more listening.

2. At some point I stood up to fiddle something else, and I noticed a dramatic increase in volume, and I mean dramatic, like more than 6dB. This is when it hit me -I need to pitch them down at the tops, so they are pointing at me and not shooting sound over my head! How the F@^& did I not notice this before?!?

Over my head no longer! With the speakers tilted a mere 3deg from top to bottom, something magic happened. All the sudden there were no hotspots, and no nulls. It was really that easy. Fuck. Angling them from top to bottom made it so they wouldn't stay at the 30deg toe angle that I found to make ears happy, so I made some little fabric tethers to keep them suspended at whatever toe angle.

Ever since then, my rear channels have become my remote headphones. My mains still get more action, but the rears can now compete on an even playing field. Now I 'get' the Maggie thing, and now they have job security... and it only took me five years to figure out!!

Heh, my Maggies made me realize I'm just... well, stupid apparently. The solution was over my head. Literally. I've had my MC-1's (the bigger ones that hingemount on the wall, 80-22K Hz) for about 5 years, but it was only a few months ago that I finally figured out how to place them. Just before then, I was even actually beginning to toy with the notion of releasing them back into the wild before I had the epiphany that fixed the problem. The chain of events that led me there went something like this:

It started with the pair of Baby TN's (2/3 scale Hsu TN1220's) I made, to bi-amp them to (in case your having trouble sleeping.http://forum.hsuresearch.com/showthread.php?t=95023) in order to make my rear channels run full range, since the AM radio effect of their 80Hz roll off always left me um, wanting, but I just put up with it and the rears of my system got minimal use. This always seemed a shame, especially when people would come over and notice them, usually prompting questions and sometimes even some listening. Not that anyone every slighted the sound they made, in fact most thought they were pretty neato but I don't really think they can really hear shit anyways, so that never tricked me into being satisfied.

They are mounted to the wall my couch is butted up against, flanking the couch, with one in a corner and one mid-wall. With them mounted plumb from top to bottom, I used to keep them angled at around 45deg, although they would get pushed around and the angle would vary (they swing like cabinet doors on their hinge mounts, which allows the toe angle to be adjusted to preference). Due to one side having to clear a heater, they are about 32" off the floor. There were really bad hot spots and also null spots, and I could never figure out just quite WTF was going on, although I figured it had something to do with placement but paid little attention to it and just 'lived with it', and for a long ass time too.

The Baby TN's are located directly under each one, and I use an Outlaw ICBM 1 to actively cross them (I've found 100Hz to be just right, with 24dB/octave high pass and 36dB low), and get really seamless integration. Life was starting to look up! After the honeymoon with the new sound was over, my objectivity returned and there was still this little matter of hot spots and nulls. Two things happened before I said "Eureka"!

1) my buddy mentioned to me he couldn't hear the speaker on his side of the couch when his head was in a certain spot. We traded places and whoa, I explored around with my ears and mapped a huge null zone, parallel with the the speaker's lengthwise direction, and directly off it's edge. With tones playing through them I experimented further and found I could dramatically change the size of the null and it's relation to the edge by moving it through it's 'swing range', with it being the very worst at 45deg. It became so obvious what was happening, that I was immediately embarrassed for having suffered 5 years of such an easily cured syndrome. What was happening was the 180 out of phase stuff was coming off the back of the speaker and cancelling with the waves off the front. The 45 toe angle creates a perfectly symmetrical wave propagation and collects into the largest null. With this information slowly peculating it's way through my neural pathways, I sat back for some more listening.

2. At some point I stood up to fiddle something else, and I noticed a dramatic increase in volume, and I mean dramatic, like more than 6dB. This is when it hit me -I need to pitch them down at the tops, so they are pointing at me and not shooting sound over my head! How the F@^& did I not notice this before?!?

Over my head no longer! With the speakers tilted a mere 3deg from top to bottom, something magic happened. All the sudden there were no hotspots, and no nulls. It was really that easy. Fuck. Angling them from top to bottom made it so they wouldn't stay at the 30deg toe angle that I found to make ears happy, so I made some little fabric tethers to keep them suspended at whatever toe angle.

Ever since then, my rear channels have become my remote headphones. My mains still get more action, but the rears can now compete on an even playing field. Now I 'get' the Maggie thing, and now they have job security... and it only took me five years to figure out!!